Theosophical Jewels: Septenary Anthropos

Philaletheians UK · Constitution of Man Series · 1 page

One of five photographic plates in this section issued under the heading Theosophical Jewels, and built like the pair in Buddhas and Initiates — beaded jewellery photographed against a soft grey ground, arranged so the arrangement itself carries the meaning. Here the beads form a long doubled loop rather than a closed circle: at one end white and pale blue stones with black and gold-flecked beads, running down through yellow and deep blue into green, orange, red and rose, and finishing in a scatter of small figured beads and two clear glass drops that hang free of the loop.

The caption reads: Septenary Anthropos, son of the Heavenly Man, a "fallen angel," a god in exile. That phrase is what makes the open loop the point of the plate rather than an accident of arrangement — the thread does not close on itself, and the two drops hang outside it. Read alongside the studies in this section, the Anthropos is the sevenfold man of the Overview, and the exile is the descent treated at length in The Voice of the Will and in Oedipus and Sphinx unriddled, where the divine ray is described as self-exiled from its celestial abode. The section list offers the plate both as a PDF and as a JPEG.

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